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Open Hardware: Good for Your Brand, Good for Your Bottom Line

With the rise of IoT, we're inside a short window where "open" is a
strong differentiator for hardware products. Is your company ready to take
advantage of it?

I don't know how to put this, but Hardware is kind of a Big Deal, and thanks
to the Internet of Things (aka IoT), it's getting bigger every year. The
analyst firm IDC expects spending on IoT to reach nearly $800
billion USD by
the end of 2018. A study by Intel shows that by 2025, the global worth of IoT
technology might be as high as more
than $6 trillion USD; whereas Forbes reports
that the global market could be nearly
$9 trillion USD in 2020.

These statistics are based on the traditional model of closed design and
development of the chips, boards and objects that will make these devices a
reality. However, what if hardware developers were to learn from and leverage
the popularity of free and open-source software (aka FOSS)? What if the
future of IoT were Open? It's my belief that the device developers who apply
the lessons of FOSS to hardware development will be those best positioned to
become the powerhouses of that $9 trillion market. Similarly to software,
open hardware will be seen first as a differentiator (rather than an
eccentricity) and later, as the industry matures, as the default operating
mode for hardware development.